Share Your Photos--No Printing Required

With the rise of digital imaging, new applications and devices for sharing photos are turning up everywhere. The $299 Kensington Digital Photo Album and VideoChip Technologies' Photo Wallet offer two ways to easily share your images, but one is for your desk while the other is portable.

The Kensington Digital Photo Album is an attractive, silver-colored frame that can either stay connected to your PC's USB port or be placed wherever you choose. Powered by an AC adapter, the Digital Photo Album measures about 6 by 9 inches; the dimensions of its inset, 16-bit color LCD screen measures about 5.7 inches across the diagonal. Intended to look at home on your desk or in an office reception area, the picture frame's display can cycle through up to 12 320-by-240 images.

Ideal for digital camera users is the VideoChip Photo Wallet, which is about the size and shape of a personal digital assistant. The Photo Wallet plays images in slide-show style, but it isn't tethered to your computer or to an outlet--it runs on two DL123A, 3-volt lithium batteries. The batteries lasted just under 3 hours in our informal, continuous-use test. Images are stored on a CompactFlash card, which is available in various sizes from 4MB to 340MB.

Digital Photo Album: Ready Right Out of the Box

Installation of the Kensington Digital Photo Album and its included Album Manager software went smoothly on our 733-MHz Pentium III system running Windows 98 (the only operating system the frame supports); we were up and running almost immediately. We loaded test images saved in .bmp, .jpg, .pict, .png, and .tif formats. (The Digital Photo Album also supports .pcx, .psd, and .tga files, as well as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations saved as image files.)

Once you're within the Album Manager software, you can adjust images by selecting the Customize option; from there you can crop an image to the size you want, edit out portions of an image, and rotate it. Alternatively, the software can also automatically crop the graphic if you click Best Fit. If you import images from a separate image editor, or if you don't want to crop your images to fit the Digital Photo Album's dimensions and screen resolution, the album software will choose how to crop it for you.

When you're done preparing your images, you simply drag and drop them into the empty "album" layout at the bottom left of the window. On the right side of the screen, controls let you specify landscape or portrait display (you must choose one orientation or the other for any given album layout) and set the duration each image stays on screen (seconds, minutes, or hours). You then click Send to Photo Album, and your completed album of up to 12 images will be uploaded to the Digital Photo Album.

After images are uploaded into the frame's memory, you can unplug the USB cable and move the frame to other locations. Just plug it into an outlet and start the show by using the Digital Photo Album's simple controls (play, stop, forward, and back buttons, along with a wheel for adjusting contrast).

Sharing Images on the Web

Kensington's Album Manager also offers tools for sending your album to the Kensington Digital Fridge, a free, online photo-sharing site that lets you create personal online albums or post to a publicly accessible photo archive. The connectivity goes both ways: At any time, you can download images from the online archive for display on your Digital Photo Album.

Kensington's user manual is brief but comprehensive, and its illustrations are clear and helpful. The Album Manager software also provides Web-based help. Overall, the Kensington Digital Photo Album is extremely intuitive to use; it's possible to set the Album up without ever consulting the manual. The only mystery we encountered was the Digital Photo Album's poor display of .tif images: Photos and graphics saved as .tif files appeared pixelated and had a bluish cast. And in contrasty light it was difficult to see what was on screen from any vantage point other than head-on or at a slight angle.

A higher-capacity model, the Kensington Photo Album Plus, is available for $399 and has 24-image capacity, 640-by-480-pixel resolution, and a screen that's 7.4 diagonal inches.